American Language (136 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
. Hawaiian
Hawaiian, which belongs to the Polynesian family of languages and is closely related to Samoan, Maori, Tahitian and Tongan, is the dying tongue of a dying people. The Census of 1930 discovered
but 22,636 pure-blood Hawaiians in the archipelago, and even the addition of 28,224 persons of mixed blood left them greatly outnumbered by the Caucasians, the Filipinos and the Japanese. The Territorial Legislature, in 1923, passed an act providing for “the preparation and publication of a school text-book in the Hawaiian language,” and seven years later a slim volume prepared by Mrs. Mary H. Atcherley was brought out under the imprint of the Hawaiian Board of Missions,
134
but English has been taught in the schools since 1853, and since 1896 it has been obligatory. Writing more than a generation ago, William M. Langdon said in an editorial in the
Paradise of the Pacific:
135
By the end of this century the Hawaiian speech will have as little usage as Gaelic or Irish has now, and it will not be many years hence when there will be but small demand for Hawaiian-English interpreters. The native children in the public and private schools are getting a good knowledge of English speech. Hawaiians who speak only their native tongue find it difficult to obtain employment. Time was, thirty years or so ago, when it was necessary for every foreigner to learn Hawaiian; now it becomes necessary for the Hawaiian to learn English.
Since the time of Kamehameha the Great the Hawaiian tongue has been almost revolutionized, so many idioms have crept in and so many English expressions with Hawaiian spelling and pronunciation have been adopted. The children now in school will retain, as long as they live, a comprehension of their mother-tongue and an affection for it too, but it is doubtful if the same can be said of
their
children.
“When Mr. Langdon wrote this,” says Frederick B. Withington,
136
“there was considerable Hawaiian spoken throughout the Islands. Most of the important firms had … signs with their names in the native tongue. For instance, the law firm of Castle and Withington was known to the Hawaiians as
Kakela e Wilkinokona
. An understanding of Hawaiian was often necessary in the law courts, and many documents were written or printed in both English and Hawaiian. Today little or none of this bilingual use is necessary.” The decay of Hawaiian Mr. Withington ascribes to eight causes, as follows:
(a) Its inadequacy. Hawaiian was a primitive language and was unable to satisfy the needs of a modern world.
(b) The influx of foreign terms. As the Hawaiian became conscious of the
need of new terms he adopted them from the foreigner. Many of these came from uncultured traders and sailors and thus were crude.
(c) The tendency to vulgarity. The better classes used English and left the Hawaiian to the less cultured. The result was that the language tended toward the vulgar.
(d) The decrease of the Hawaiian population. If Captain Cook was correct in his estimate of the population, then the Hawaiian population has gone from over 400,000 to about 50,000 in three quarters of a century.
(e) The desire for English-conducted schools by the Hawaiians themselves.
(f) The paucity of a literature. There was no literature among the Hawaiians until the missionaries came and helped them to write it.
(g) The growing relations with the outside world. As the natives increased their trade they made more and more use of one of the great modern languages.
(h) The Islands become part of the United States. As Hawaii became an integral part of the United States, English became the official language.
Hawaiian has the shortest alphabet ever heard of — the five vowels and
h, k, l, m, n, p
and
w
, or twelve letters in all. It is thus constrained to make radical changes in many loan-words,
e.g., kapiki
(cabbage),
kala
(dollar),
keleponi
(telephone),
loke
(rose) and
Kelemania
(Germany). All the vowels are used as words, and all have multiple meanings,
e.g., a
is a verb in the perfect meaning lit, a noun meaning a small rock, an adjective meaning rocky, an adverb meaning to or until, and a preposition meaning to or of. Other words are formed by combining two vowels,
e.g., aa
(dwarf),
ia
(he, she or it),
ua
(rain), or a consonant and vowel,
e.g., ko
(sugar),
nu
(roar),
wa
(time),
hi
(cholera). Not only must every word end with a vowel, but also every syllable. Two consonants may never come together. The effect on loan-words is shown in
aila
(oil),
alemanaka
(almanac),
amene
(amen),
baka
(tobacco),
bele
(bell),
berena
(bread),
bipi
(beef cattle),
buke
(book),
eka
(acre),
galani
(gallon),
kanapi
(centipede),
kapena
(captain),
keneta
(cent),
paona
(pound),
pena
(paint),
peni
(pen),
penikala
(pencil),
pepa
(paper),
Sabati
(Sabbath),
sekona
(second),
silika
(silk),
talena
(talent). Here are some specimen sentences showing the use of loan-words:
Ke kamailio nei oia ma ka olelo
Beretania
(He speaks in British,
i.e.
, English).
Ua kuai lilo mai la au i elima mau
galani
(I bought five gallons).
Eia wau ke hoouna aku nei ia oe i umi mau
keneta
(I am sending you ten cents).
Ke kani nei ke kanaka i ka
bele
(The man is ringing the bell).
137
The surviving Hawaiian periodical literature seems to consist only of a weekly published at Hilo and a Sunday-school monthly, in Hawaiian and English, at Honolulu.
. Gipsy
The language of the Gypsies is a dialect related to those of the northwestern frontier of India, and their Indian ancestors seem to have wandered through Kabulistan into Persia and Syria in the Thirteenth Century. One section then struck southward into Egypt, and the other proceeded into Europe. They are now scattered over all of Europe, and most of northern Africa and North America. In every country where they have settled they have picked up many loan-words from the local language, but Romany or Romanes is still a distinct tongue, with a grammatical system of its own and a vocabulary understood by the Gypsies of widely separated countries.
138
Most Gypsies speak this Romanes more or less, but in the United States they commonly use English in their everyday business, with a copious admixture of Romanes words. An example: “
Once
apré
a
chairus
a
Romany chal chored
a
rāni chillico,
and then
jāiled atút
a
prastraméngro ’pré
the
drum” (Once upon a time a Gypsy stole a turkey, and then met a policeman on the road).
139
There is a masculine definite article,
o
, in Romanes, and a feminine article,
i
, but the American Gypsies always use the English
the
. The indefinite article is also borrowed, but sometimes it is omitted altogether, as in “Dikóva gáiro” (I see a man). Many of the nouns have suffixes indicating gender, to wit,
-o
for the masculine, and
-i
for the feminine. There are some traces of grammatical gender, but in the main these suffixes are used logically. Thus,
chávo
is boy and
chavi
or
chai
is girl,
gáiro
is man and
gáiri
is woman. The plural is formed by adding
-e, -aw
or
-yaw, e.g., peéro
(foot),
peere
(feet);
grei
(horse),
gréiaw
(horses). But in many, and perhaps most cases the English
-s
is used. In Pennsylvania there are a few small groups of German Gypsies, known locally as
Shekener
or
Chikener
(Ger.
Zigeuner
). They immigrated from the Rhineland during the Eighteenth Century. Their
dialect shows a great many loans from Pennsylvania-German, e.g.,
kotz
(cat),
haws
(rabbit),
hausleira
(peddler),
bawm
(tree),
goul
(horse),
schlong
(snake).
140
The number of Gypsies surviving in the United States is unknown, for the Census Bureau is unaware of them. The tribes that once roved the country have been much depleted by disease, intermarriage and the hustling of the police. Most of them are now located in large cities, where the women practise fortune-telling and the men work at ordinary trades.
1
A Dictionary of the Non-English Words of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect, by M. B. Lambert; Lancaster, Pa., 1924, p. viii.
2
Lambert, just cited.
3
The Early Literature of the Pennsylvania-Germans, by Samuel W. Pennypacker,
Proceedings of the Pennsylvania-German Society
, Vol. II, 1893; reprinted 1907, p. 41.
4
Lambert’s dictionary has been mentioned. It includes an account of Pennsylvania-German phonology. The best treatise on the dialect is The Pennsylvania-German Dialect, by M. D. Learned,
American Journal of Philology
, Vol. IX, 1888, and Vol. X, 1889, a series of four papers. Other informative works are Pennsylvania-Dutch, by S. S. Haldeman; Philadelphia, 1872; Pennsylvania-German Manual, by A. R. Home, 3rd ed.; Allentown, Pa., 1905; Common Sense Pennsylvania-German Dictionary, by James C. Lins; Reading, Pa., 1895; Pennsylvania-German, by Daniel Miller, 2 vols.; Reading, 1903–11; Pennsylvania-Dutch Handbook, by E. Rauch; Mauch Chunk, Pa., 1879. There are many papers on various aspects of the dialect in the
Proceedings of the Pennsylvania-German Society
, 1891 —, and in the
Pennsylvania-German
, 1900 —. Unfortunately, there is no agreement among the writers on the dialect about its representation in English print.
5
Harbaugh’s Harfe, rev. ed.; Philadelphia, 1002, p. 112.
6
Mauch Chunk, Pa., 1879.
7
Other strains from Harbaugh’s harp are given in Pennsylvania-Dutch, by Maynard D. Follin,
American Speech
, 1929.
8
On the German Dialect Spoken in the Valley of Virginia,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. III, Pt. IV, 1908.
9
I am informed by Mr. August Blum of Pasadena, Calif., who was born in the Western Palatinate near Otterberg, that this specimen of Valley German is virtually identical with the dialect still spoken in his native village. “A few unimportant changes,” he says, “would complete the identity, e.g.,
emol
for
eimol, aa
for
au, kumme
for
komme, genwmne
for
gnomme
.”
10
There were more before 1914. But the German press, as a whole, had been declining since 1894. See The Immigrant Press and Its Control, by Robert E. Park; New York, 1922, p. 318
ff
., and especially the chart lacing p. 318. The New York
Staats-Zeitung
and the St. Louis
Westliche Post
, the two leading dailies, go back to 1834, and the
Volksblatt
of Cincinnati, now merged in the
Freie Presse
, was founded in 1836.
11
March 28, 1935. I am indebted for this to Mr. George Weiss, Jr., of Richmond Hills, N. Y.
Stiefel-beiner
, perhaps, would have been better. The author of “Der Charlie” is Mr. Heinrich Reinhold Hirsch, editor of the
Staats-Zeitung
.
12
Mr. Stein has printed the following collections of his lays: Die schönste Lengvitch; Chicago, 1925; Gemixte Pickles; Chicago, 1927; and Lim-burger Lyrics; New York, 1932.
13
The Gender of English Loan-Words in Colloquial American German,
Language Monographs
, No. VII, Dec., 1930.
14
Save for the Pennsylvania-German form, American German, like American English, has been very little studied by philologians. It offers rich opportunities to industrious young
Dozenten
.
15
The Jersey Dutch Dialect,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. III, Pt. VI, 1910.
16
The Dutch settled in South Africa in 1652, but it was not until about 1860 that Afrikaans began to produce a literature. It is so far from Standard Dutch that it has been described as a dialect of Hottentot, but this is an exaggeration. See Grammar of Afrikaans, by M. C. Botha and J. F. Burger; Cape Town, 1921,
pref.
; Afrikaans for English-Speaking Students, by D. J. Potgieter and A. Geldenhuys; Cape Town, n.d.; and Oor die Onstaan van Afrikaans, by D. B. Bosman; Amsterdam, 1928. The last is a valuable historical survey.
17
Private communication, April 13, 1921.
18
I am indebted here to the Rev. B. D. Dykstra of Orange City, Iowa.
19
I am indebted here to Mr. Frank Hanson of Redlands, Calif.
20
Nederlanders in Amerika, by J. van Hinte; Amsterdam, 1928, Vol. II, p. 554.
21
Grand Rapids, Mich., 1919.
22
Grand Rapids, 1929.
23
I am indebted for information and suggestions to Prof. B. K. Kuiper, Dr. Paul de Kruif, Mr. Dirk Nieland, Mr. M. J. Francken, Mr. J. L. Van Lancker, Mr. W. A. Nyland, Mme. Hortense Leplae, Dr. John J. Hiemenga, Mr. H. H. D. Langereis and Mr. D. J. Van Riemsdyck, in addition to those already mentioned.
24
The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration; Minneapolis, 1932, p. 407.
25
Stephenson, just cited, p. 429.
26
Mr. Berger’s first report on it, Vårt Språk, was published by the Augustana Book Concern at Rock Island in 1912. In 1934 he brought out an enlarged edition under the title of Svensk-amerikanska Språket. Dr. Andreen’s Det Svenska Språket i Amerika appeared as No. 87 of the series called Studentföreningen Småskrifter; Stockholm, 1900. It contains a map marking the Swedish areas in the United States.
27
For example, Engelskans Inflytande på Svenska Språket i America, by E. A. Zetterstrand,
Ungdomsvän-nen
(Stockholm), June, July and Aug., 1904, and Svenskan in Amerika, by Ruben G:son Berg; Stockholm, 1904.
28
Notes on Swedish-American, by Robert Beckman,
American Speech
, Aug., 1928, p. 448.
29
In Standard Swedish
luff a
means to jog, to scamper, to trot.
30
Chicago, 1908.
31
Kom
, of course, is good Swedish, but
kom an
is a loan.
32
Swedish-American
I Bane, American Speech
, Aug., 1928.
33
I am indebted for aid to Prof. Walter Gustafson, of Upsala College, East Orange, N. J., and to Messrs. John A. Stahlberg, V. Berger, A. H. Anderson, John Goldstrom, Robert Beckman and Valdemar Viking.
34
Notes on American-Norwegian, With a Vocabulary,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. II, Pt. II, 1900.
35
English Elements in the Norse Dialects of Utica, Wis.,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. II, Pt. IV, 1902.
36
His principal publications are A Grammar of the Sogn Dialect of Norwegian,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. III, Pt. I, 1905; English Loan-Words in American-Norwegian,
American Speech
, July, 1926; On the Phonology of Loan-Words in the Norwegian Dialects of Koshkonong in Wisconsin, in Studier tilägnade Axel Kock; Lund (Sweden), 1926; Um det norske målet i Amerika,
Saerprent
(Bergen), 1931; and The Gender of English Loan-Nouns in Norse Dialects in America,
Journal of Germanic Philology
, Vol. V, 1903. The first-named article deals with the noun, pronoun, adjective and numerals in the Americanized form of the Sogn dialect. “The verb,” says Dr. Flom, “will form the subject of a later paper.” That later paper was completed during 1935, but it has not yet appeared.
37
English Loan-Words in American Norwegian, above cited.
38
A Study of Norwegian Dialect in Minnesota,
Dialect Notes
, Aug., 1930.
39
Notes on American-Norwegian, above cited.
40
English Elements in the Norse Dialects of Utica, Wis., above cited.
41
Mr. Valdemar Viking tells me that the
täi
here is not a corruption of the English
tie
, but a good Dano-Norwegian word.
Halstäi
means anything that is draped around the neck, such as ties, collars, mufflers, etc.
42
In addition to the gentlemen already mentioned, I am indebted for aid to Messrs. A. H. Anderson and Wallace Lomoe.
43
English Loan-Nouns Used in the Icelandic Colony of North Dakota,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. II, Pt. V, 1903.
44
In order to avoid two Icelandic characters that are unknown in modern English and might be confusing, I have adopted the equivalents approved by the Royal Geographical Society of England.
45
These are mainly from Frá Ameríka, a lecture by Jón Ólafsson, delivered at Reykjavik in 1897 and printed in
Sunnanfari
, Vol. VII, 1898, p. 1
ff
. For the reference and the translations I am indebted to the great courtesy of Dr. Einarsson.
46
Bess-bréf,
Heimskringla
, 1893–4.
47
Kvidhlingar; Winnipeg, 1920.
48
Isaac A. Millner, in What is Yiddish?,
East and West
, April 20, 1923, says that 20% of the Yiddish vocabulary is Hebrew. This part includes some very important elements, classified by Mr. Millner as follows: (
a
) words that refer to the Jewish religion,
e.g., kosher;
(b) words that stand in some relation to it,
e.g., chedar;
(c) words that have to do with elementary education,
e.g., cheshbon
(arithmetic); (
d
) generic words,
e.g., chaye
(living being); (
e
) words signifying phenomena that “are clothed by the popular consciousness with a superstitious glamour,”
e.g., ka-doches
(fever); (f) words referring to birth, marriage and death,
e.g., levaya
(funeral); and (g) terms of opprobrium or approbation,
e.g., bal-zedoko
(charitable person).
49
Quoted by George Wolfe in Notes on American Yiddish,
American Mercury
, Aug., 1933, p. 478.
50
I am indebted throughout this section to Mr. Abraham Cahan, editor of the leading Yiddish daily in New York, and a distinguished writer in both Yiddish and English.
51
See the article on Yiddish, by Nathaniel Buchwald, in the Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. IV, p. 598, and the bibliography following, p. 822
ff
, and also Curiosities of Yiddish Literature, by A. A. Roback; New York, 1933.
52
See Notes on Yiddish, by H. B. Wells,
American Speech
, Oct., 1928, p. 63
ff
.
53
Language
, March, 1928, p. 43.
54
Speech Mixture in French Canada,
American Journal of Philology
, Vol. X, No. 2, 1889, p. 143.
55
Quebec, 1909. This work is a lexicon running to 671 pp.
56
Montreal, 1894.
57
For these I am indebted to Lieut. Col. E. L. M. Burns of Ottawa.
58
Ottawa, 1916, p. 22.
59
Dominion French Discovered, New York
Sun
, June 30, 1927. The literature of Canadian French, by native philologians, is extensive. There is a bibliography of it, down to 1908, in A Study of an Acadian-French Dialect Spoken on the North Shore of the Baie-des-Chaleurs, by James Geddes, Jr., Halle, 1908, and there are many references to later writings in the appendix to Louvigny de Montigny’s La langue française au Canada, above cited. A Société du Parler Français au Canada was founded at Quebec in 1902 under the auspices of Laval University, and on June 29, 1912 the first Congres de la Langue Française au Canada was held at Quebec. Its proceedings were published the same year. See also Dialect Research in Canada, by A. F. Chamberlain,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. I, Pt. II, 1890, which contains a bibliography running to 1890. The earliest American writer on the subject was the late Dr. A. Marshall Elliott (1844–1910), professor of Romance languages at the Johns Hopkins University, and founder of the Modern Language Association (1883) and
Modern Language Notes
(1886). His pioneer paper, Contributions to a History of the French Language in Canada appeared in the
American Journal of Philology
, Vol. VI, Pt. II, 1885. He followed it with four papers on Speech Mixture in French Canada in the same journal, Vol. VII, Pt. II, 1886; Vol. VIII, Pts. II and III, 1887; and Vol. X, Pt. II, 1889.
60
Louisiana-French,
Louisiana State University Studies
, No. 5, 1931. This is a work of 253 pages, and is full of valuable material, especially on loan-words.
61
An account of it is in Louisiana Gumbo, by Edward Laroque Tinker,
Yale Review
, Spring, 1932.
62
Notes on Louisiana-French,
Language
, Dec., 1934.
63
Edward J. Fortier, in the Cambridge History of American Literature; New York, 1921, Vol. IV, p. 591. A bibliography is appended, p. 820
ff
.
64
There is a bibliography of Louisiana-French in Dr. Read’s monograph, above cited, and another in The Survival of French in the Old District of Sainte Genevieve [Missouri], by W. A. Dorrance,
University of Missouri Studies
, Vol. X, No. 2, 1935.
65
L’Esthétique de la langue Française; Paris, 1899.
66
Vol. IX, No. 2, April–June, 1918, p. 206
if
.
67
Of especial value are two articles on Italian Dialects in the United States, by Herbert H. Vaughn, professor of Italian at the University of California,
American Speech
, May and October, 1926; Piedmontese Dialects in the United States, by A. G. Zallio of Sacramento Junior College,
American Speech
, Sept., 1927; and The Speech of Little Italy, by Anthony M. Turano, an Italian-American lawyer of Reno, Nev.,
American Mercury
, July, 1932.
68
For example, Un Italiano in America, by Adolfo Rossi; Treviso, 1907, and Incontro col Nord America, by Franco Ciarlantini; Milan, 1929. A translation of Signor Ciar-lantini’s chapter, The Italian Language in the United States, was published in
Atlantica
(New York), March, 1930, p. 15.
69
It is to be found in his Poesie, Vol. II; Bologna, 1897; 5th ed., 1912. There is an account of it in La Merica Sanemagogna, by Dr. Livingston, who says that it was inspired by Pascoli’s “contact with Italian emigrants returning to the Tuscan hills.” It is also described and discussed in Italienisch-Amerikanisches, by Walther Fischer,
Neuere Sprachen
, Sept., 1920, p. 164
ff
.